Climate action rises above hot air

Date: March 28 2009

Those accusing the Government of scaremongering on climate change are a tad frightened themselves, writes Marian Wilkinson.

An earnest young scientist this week stood at the podium of the nation's most important climate change conference, flicking through a presentation of rising temperatures off Australia's north-west. She then moved on to global predictions out to 2060 showing the temperature rising steadily and dangerously.

The scientist was no academic, CSIRO boffin or environmentalist. Elena Mavrofridis is a chemical engineer with Woodside Energy, the company that recently went toe-to-toe with the Climate Change Minister, Penny Wong, in a political battle to water down the Federal Government's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

While Woodside's American boss, Don Voelte, has been at loggerheads with the Rudd Government over how to cut Australia's greenhouse gas pollution, his engineers have been working closely with scientists from the CSIRO and elsewhere to make sure Woodside can protect its own multibillion-dollar operations from climate change impacts.

The company initiated its own climate change study to assess how warming temperatures, rising sea levels, storm surges and a possible increase in tropical storms could hit the bottom line of the super-profitable North West Shelf gas project.

Mavrofridis told the packed auditorium that rising temperatures would probably affect Woodside operations, because the company uses, in effect, huge refrigerators to liquefy North West Shelf gas before export.

"An ambient temperature increase directly affects the efficiency of that refrigeration process," Mavrofridis said. "So predictions like these really help us to choose and design our facilities."

As hundreds of scientists, policy makers and business executives came together at the Greenhouse 2009 conference in Perth this week, one jarring theme overwhelmed the program - the disconnect between the tortuous climate change debate in Canberra and the reality for business, farmers and public servants trying to plan for likely impact. And many of Australia's scientists, caught in the middle of this disconnect, find it deeply troubling.

In January, the National Party Senate leader Barnaby Joyce accused "environmental goose-steppers" of denying climate change sceptics a proper hearing. He likened climate scientists to "doomsayers" who wrongly predicted a Y2K crisis.

But as Joyce comforts sceptics, the peanut industry, once synonymous with the National Party in his home state of Queensland, is acting on scientific warnings about climate change. The Peanut Company of Australia is buying new farm properties in the Northern Territory to hedge against south-east Queensland's falling rainfall.

Andrew Ash, the CSIRO's senior scientific adviser on adapting the nation to climate change, says the peanut industry is acting now to protect its interests, but many other industries ignore the urgency. "In some areas much bigger changes will be needed," he told the Herald. "That's where things get a lot more difficult - working out what form those changes might take and when they might be required."

Ash came to Perth fresh from Copenhagen, where a global scientific congress heard climate change impacts were tracking at the worse-case scenarios predicted by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just two years ago.

These include rising temperatures and rising sea levels. With new evidence that the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, and many of the world's glaciers, are melting faster than predicted, projections for sea-level rise have doubled.

Ash said the fact that climate change's main indicators were tracking at the top level of projections mirrored global greenhouse gas emissions, which also were tracking at the top end of the UN panel's projections.

His colleague, Mark Howden, told the Copenhagen and Perth conferences that Australia's food security was threatened. Australia is a big contributor to world food security because it exports about 80 per cent of its wheat. But CSIRO projections show the main wheat-growing areas in southern NSW, Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia face rising temperatures and big declines in rain. If climate change keeps tracking at the worse-case scenarios, "Australia could become a net importer of wheat by 2070", Howden said.

While Joyce plays down the urgency of climate change, many National Party supporters are likely to be the most damaged. The new head of the CSIRO, Megan Clark, a former vice-president for technology with BHP Billiton, underscored the threat. "Our climate modellers have recently discovered that Australia could be hit even harder by drought," Clark told the Perth conference. Spring rain in the nation's food bowl - the southern Murray Darling Basin - could fall by 30 per cent.

She cited rising sea levels as one of the more urgent threats. "This means, without intervention, a sea-level rise of one metre or more will be seen by the generation born today. Coupled with an increase in severe cyclones, and flooding, we could see coastal erosion, damage to infrastructure and extreme hardship for the delta regions of the world."

The growing gulf between scientific advice and Australia's political debate frustrates not only scientists but the head of the Government's Climate Change Review, Ross Garnaut, who told the Perth audience the Canberra debate was now dominated by the ignorant and the myopic.

But as Opposition and Labor MPs step up warnings against tough climate medicine in times of economic crisis, nervous businesses and public servants are demanding help on to how to plan for climate change.

Three big electricity distributors in Victoria and South Australia have hired the the engineering consultants Maunsell Aecom to advise them on protecting power lines and poles. In Perth, Donna Lorenz of Maunsell told how this summer's unprecedented high temperatures and subsequent power failures ratcheted up energy company concerns.

The British-born head of Victoria's TRUenergy Richard McIndoe warned Wong and her Labor colleagues that, if generators were denied special consideration, lights could go off and innovative research could be abandoned.

In the highest temperatures on record this summer, lights went off anyway as generators failed to meet demand. Left wearing customers' wrath, however, were electricity retailers, not the big-polluting generators who keep insisting on dispensation to keep emitting greenhouse gases.

Power distributors are just some of the extending list of essential services lining up for advice on adapting to climate change. Michael Nolan, of Maunsell Aecom, advises the NSW Roads and Traffic Authority on threats to coastal roads from rising sea levels and storm surges.

Nolan says the combination could threaten more than 200,000 NSW coastal properties, along with ports, bridges and sewerage works.

This week, the Rudd Government finally issued tenders calling for advice on how to protect the national infrastructure from the impacts of climate change. Planning for adaption to climate change, however difficult, is proving easier for the Government than cutting greenhouse emissions.

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